IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 100

Song 3. “Victims.” Based on true facts,
it mixes special police procedures
against black people with an exhortation
to study the Constitution and the practice of Civil Law. An excerpt says:
“Make sure and look at his face and
badge number, look good at the car/get
its license plate number…”

Hiding my youth of vocation and talent/I don’t know if my feet are on the
ground or I’m living a dream/my city is
the capital of rap and is falling apart, it
inevitably crumbles/and many as what
this is…”
Obsesión, Magia and Alexey’s group
broadened the subject of race in their
music to include gender, too. One could
say that this group has deeply studied
race, gender and culture in Cuba, and it
goes way beyond just writing and performing songs. The number of historical
facts and people from our culture they
include, and the diversity with which
they expound on the topic of blackness,
which is indeed diverse, is astounding.
They even got to the point of producing
an entire record about race; it is the first
one in the history of Cuban culture dedicated to racism, and with it they won
the Cuba disco award in the Hip Hop
category. What follows now is a short
tour through their black record Obsesión:

Song 4. “Interlude” (Eduardo in good
form). A live recording with a group of
children in which they [the rappers] ask
a series of questions about events that
marked the course of Cuban history,
like the second U.S. intervention, the
Independent Party of Color’s uprising,
and the Escalera Conspiracy; every
time they ask the kids a question about
these events, the children shout
“No!!!!!” all together.
Song 5. “I Afro know myself.” A song
by Magia with D’V Young to show they
are born again offspring of their encounter with the Africanness from
which they descend; they go on in
Spanish and English about the responsibility of passing the tools onto new generations. Here are some lines: “I was
imagining what it would be like if this
always relegated issue was not limited
to only intellectual circles,/if it was discussed amongst communities,/if it
wasn’t absent from our educational system,/where it is dealt with as pure history, and not current, if our social mechanisms did not reproduce the problem,/if
I didn’t have to write this song…”

Song 1: “Intro” (The Griot). This is a
musical call to our Afro-descendant
essence containing the humility, wisdom, and beauty of our African heritage. An excerpt says: “He told me:
shape your face, pay your debt, plant
your tree, play the drum, shout your
name, leave your mark, always walk
towards the sun…”
Song 2. “You and your ballet.” It celebrates a ballet student who out of ignorance speaks disrespectfully about the
places and feasts where Afrodescendants get together to dance
rhumba.

Song 6. “El Loco.” Cubans who are
crazy can express themselves much
more freely than any others.

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